Summary of the review of
Markus Freitag and Isabelle Stadelmann-Steffen
The worlds of voluntary work – civic engagement in the Swiss language regions
Over the past years, it has become widely acknowledged that civic engagement plays an important role for the social integration of the community. With this in mind, the observation that volunteering not only varies considerably between population groups, but between language regions as well, takes on a particular importance. The German-speaking Swiss tend to be more civically engaged than their neighbours in the Italian and French speaking regions. In the theoretical discussion, these differences can partially be attributed to the fact that the Swiss language regions also comprise different cultural areas and therefore, with regard to volunteering, the regions tend to orient themselves to the bordering country with which they share a language. Using data from the Swiss Volunteering Monitor 2006 as well as from the European Social Survey 2002 and 2004, Markus Freitag and Isabelle Stadelmann-Steffen* put this hypothesis to its first test. Their findings clearly show that we can indeed speak of cultures of volunteerism in terms of language regions. From the Swiss perspective, the results reveal that the Swiss language regions are less similar to one another than they are to the regions in their neighbouring countries. One exception to these reported findings deals with charitable donations: The overall level of contributions is markedly higher in Switzerland than in its neighbouring countries. However, the extent to which this result can be attributed to the Swiss self-conception of itself as a wealthy country or to the deep-seated notion of subsidiarity remains to be answered.* This review is only found in the German and French editions of the Swiss Social Report 2008.
Update: FORS